


the world as seen with a kaleidoscope's clarity

by Acai



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Agoraphobia, Alternate Universe - College/University, And eventually he comes over just to see Oikawa, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Anxiety, Anxiety Attacks, Blood and Violence, College AU, Comfort, Depersonalization, Depression, Disassociation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Falling In Love, Fear, First Meetings, Flashbacks, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Humor, Godzilla - Freeform, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Kuroo and Iwaizumi are both med majors and Iwaizumi comes over to study sometimes, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Movie Nights, Oikawa has a fear of going outside due to PTSD, Panic Attacks, Phobias, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Relapsing, Repressed Memories, Roommates, Self Confidence Issues, Trauma, recovery process, traumatic events
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-07-06 02:53:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15877002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acai/pseuds/Acai
Summary: “I still want to go to college. I still want to play volleyball. I want to do something more than sit in here and be nothing. But I can’t."Iwaizumi doesn’t say anything. Oikawa thinks it’s probably for the best, though, because he probably wouldn’t have liked any response that could have been given./ / / /In which Oikawa has agoraphobia and recovery is a long process.





	the world as seen with a kaleidoscope's clarity

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE read all the tags before diving into this fic. It gets dark at times, so don't read it if you're triggered by implied/referenced gun violence, please! 
> 
> I wrote this a year ago and forgot about it until now? I guess I never finished it. So I'm posting it here, and then tomorrow or tonight I'll write an epilogue to it, since it ends kind of abruptly. Thanks!

 

  

* * *

* * *

 

“I still want to go to college. I still want to play volleyball. I want to do something more than sit in here and be nothing. But I can’t."

Iwaizumi doesn’t say anything. Oikawa thinks it’s probably for the best, though, because he probably wouldn’t have liked any response that could have been given.

/ / / /

In which Oikawa has agoraphobia and recovery is a long process.

* * *

 

* * *

    

 

      He remembered the way that the sun felt on days when it was hot enough to make him want to nap in the grass outside. He remembered the way that the wind felt when it was _just_ strong enough to make your hair blow in your eyes on cool spring days. He remembered the way that the air smelled with flowers blooming and the breeze making his hair tickle the back of his neck.

It wasn’t anything that he felt particularly keen to experience again.

~~~~~~~~

“I’ll be back at four. Get the mail for me?”

The request was simple enough—walk to the mailbox, unlock it, take the mail out, lock it, and walk back home. It would take less than five minutes and then he’d be back inside. Oikawa could probably do that. He’d done it hundreds of times before. The door would squeal a little when he opened it, then it would click when he shut it. The pavement would feel hot under his feet, but the air would smell nice. He would slip a rubber band from the supply that was kept inside of it, collect and wrap their mail, and go back inside.

He would die if he tried.

Oikawa didn’t bother replying, he could tell Kuroo already knew from the way that his lips were pursed ever-so-slightly on the edges.

“Next time,” he mumbled, face in his arms and arms on the countertops.

Tomorrow he would say the same thing, and the day after that as well. Kuroo would pick up the mail on his way home, because it wasn’t as if he had any reason to even ask Oikawa if not to try and coax him out. If he _understood_ then he wouldn’t even ask in the first place. He said he tried to understand, and Oikawa was sure that he did, but if he truly did then he would _know_ that it couldn’t happen. He would _know_ that there was no possible way Oikawa could make it that far.

It’s later, after Kuroo has already gone off to his classes, that the rational part of Oikawa’s brain reminds him that the mailbox is only a couple feet away.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“I’ll be back at four,” Kuroo greets him the next morning, thumbing through a stack of papers on the counter. “Can  you get the mail for me?”

Oikawa watched the way the creamer in the coffee moved, eyes planted on the liquid. It was better than watching Kuroo sigh and set the papers down.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The first time since It happened that Kuroo brings home somebody to study with, Oikawa tucked himself away in his room. The door was closed and locked, the blinds were shut and slanted upwards, and there were ten blankets drawn over him as he hid himself away in his little fortress in his room. The irrational part of his mind is saying that he’s going to die. The rational part is scoffing.

He listens until their banter picks up again and then the door opens and shuts. The apartment is silent for a total of fifty-two seconds until Kuroo’s voice calls from the other side of the door.

“He’s gone now.” Oikawa doesn’t reply, and that’s fine because he doesn’t think Kuroo expects for him to anymore. “I think you would have gotten along with him, y’know? Maybe talk to him next week. He’ll come back around then to study some more.”

Oikawa’s completely and entirely certain that he’s _not_ going to talk to the boy next week.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The boy comes by again the same time each week, and Oikawa continues to slip off to his room each time he hears a knock on the door on those Tuesdays. He can always tell when they’re finished studying because they’re both quiet workers. They sit in their relative silence, working on things together when they need to, but otherwise keeping to themselves.

When they’re finished they’ll talk and talk until _finally, finally, finally_ the other boy leaves. The door shuts loudly each week, and each week Kuroo comes to inform him that the other boy has finally gone, as if Oikawa doesn’t already know that.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It takes ten and a half weeks for Oikawa to learn that Kuroo is a filthy cheater. He’s a cheater, and he knows exactly what Oikawa will fall for by this point.

Oikawa had assumed, foolishly, that, “I’m going to the store!” had meant that they were _both_ going to the store. He had disentangled himself from his safe paradise and had crept out to the living room to find a boy there, eyes focused on a textbook as he scrawled away within it.

“Hey,” the boy greets him, thick eyebrows furrowing together in confusion. “Who…?”

It occurs to Oikawa that Kuroo has failed to inform this boy that he doesn’t live alone.

“Roommate,” Oikawa breathes, forces his fingers to keep still at his side as his back itches to press against the wall and his chest leaps and yells to run and his heart pounds and oh god is he _sweating?_

The other boy seems unaware of the dilemma happening in the doorway. His eyes flit back down to his paper. “Iwaizumi Hajime,” he introduces himself.

Oikawa watches him for a moment, debating turning and darting back into his room. The rational part of his brain reminds him that he’s come out into the kitchen, so he’s at least got to make up a reason. He had a reason, but he really can’t recall it now. He stalls for a moment, mumbling his name with an unease that makes his sentence trail off at the end because his heart is still pounding and he’s seeing green and he’s dying, he’s definitely dying, he’s going to die like this in the kitchen, but his magnificent brain works even through his dying moments.

He fills up a glass of water, scurries back to his room, and takes a pill from an amber bottle that sits on his desk and watches him.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Oikawa doesn’t speak to Kuroo for a week.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The next time that they _do_ speak, it’s Monday.

Oikawa walks into the kitchen, hands tucked into an old sweater that falls down to his knees. It’s not fashionable, but it’s warm and the apartment is freezing cold. He squints at Kuroo from the other side of the counter, rummaging through the cupboards for a bowl that’s not cracked.

“What’s that look for?” Kuroo raises an eyebrow at him, arm nearly knocking over a glass of water as he shifts to stand up.

Oikawa settles for a bowl with a chip in the side. “This is your doing, isn’t it? The other tactics failed and now you’re _luring_ me out by freezing us both to death?”

“This isn’t me!” Kuroo protests, hands up in surrender. “The heater’s broken. I called to have it fixed, but they won’t be here until tomorrow. Now that you’re _here,_ though~,”

“No,” Oikawa cuts off his roommates sing-song voice, _knowing_ already what it is that he’s implying. “Do it yourself. It’s even colder outside.” He fills the bowl with cereal, sighing as he takes the milk out of the fridge. “This is it, Tetsu-chan. I’m going to die of hypothermia.”

“You’re not going to die,” Kuroo rolls his eyes, but there’s not any sarcasm or bite in his tone. Oikawa isn’t sure if it’s meant to be genuine reassurance or teasing. He chooses not to dwell and instead pours his milk into the bowl.

Kuroo’s feet made a rhythm as they hit the side of the counter. _Thud, thunk. Thud, thunk. Thud, thunk._ Oikawa listens to the beats in the silence, waiting for Kuroo to say anything else, but when he doesn’t, Oikawa turns to go to the living room.

“They’re remaking that one show we used to watch together,” Oikawa informs Kuroo, picking up his bowl and walking past him. “I haven’t heard a lot of good things about it so far, but we could—,” Oikawa’s sentence cuts off in a literal wheeze, and a past version of himself from ten and a half weeks ago would have been mortified at the sound. The present version of himself is too preoccupied with the fact that he’s dying, that his body is shutting down and he’s _dying._

“Oh, yeah. Iwaizumi’s over to study today instead of tomorrow. Forgot to tell you.” Kuroo’s voice is calm, because of course he can’t _tell_ that Oikawa’s dying.

Oikawa wonders briefly what his roommate will wear to his funeral.

Iwaizumi’s eyes glance up and stare into Oikawa’s for the longest second, and then they’re back on the paper in front of him. “Hey.”

Oikawa blinks and then he’s back in his room and the door is shut and locked and the blinds are closed and slanted upwards and he’s under ten blankets and he’s going to die.

But his heart beat slows down eventually and his lungs remember how to take in air and his ears hear the calm conversation out in the hallway. They’re talking about tests, they’re talking about school. They have the same major and they’re talking about school.

Oikawa moves more slowly than he ever has, worming out of the blankets and eventually working his way to the door. It’s the slowest progress he’s ever made, but it’s also the most progress he’s ever made. It’s the hard part, now. If he unlocks the door then he’ll be vulnerable. If he opens the door then he’ll die. He rocks on the balls of his feet for a moment, unsure as his fingers twist in his shirt and his breathing picks up a little bit. It’s the slowest progress he’s ever made, but it’s the most progress he’s ever made. Oikawa forces himself to listen to what they’re saying, because it’s calm and light and they both sound casual and happy, and if he was Going to Die then they would have sounded tense or scared or angry and then it would have been silent.

He unlocks his door.

The minute his fingers are off the lock he’s scrambling back for his bed and tucking himself under the blankets and breathing heavily. Vulnerable, vulnerable, vulnerable.

By the time he’s inched his way back over to the door, the sunlight streaming through the windows is orange instead of white.

By the time that he opens the door the sunlight is getting hard to see. But the voices are still there, and they’re talking calmly. The door is open, and he’s outside of it. He’s in the hallway. He’s been in this hallway plenty of times before, this is his hallway at home. Oikawa thinks each thing he’s supposed to think in this moment, each thing he’s been told by this therapist to tell himself. He’s not dying, he will be okay, this is the hallway of his house and nowhere else.

He forces his steps to be calm as he makes his way to the kitchen. He can hear them clearly from here, but can’t see them. That’s going to do for now.

He sits at the counter and rummages through his mind for something Normal to do in that moment. His laptop is there, it’s on the counter. It hasn’t moved in Ten and a half weeks. Oikawa opens it, types in his passcode, and stares at the document in front of him. He remembers turning this in, remembers handing it to a professor in the moments before the moment.

He closes it, opens Chrome instead, and takes a breath. It’s the slowest progress. But it’s progress. Progress seems to be what everybody has been telling him about for ten and a half weeks now.

When Iwaizumi walks by him to put on his coat and leave, he nods his head in greeting and every part of Oikawa is tense, tense, tense, but he nods back and continues typing.

Then Iwaizumi’s gone and it feels like he’s turned into Jell-O, limbs going numb with relief and the sudden ease of sitting there in the kitchen with just Kuroo, who’s watching him with a look that Oikawa can’t understand. He thinks it’s the opposite of that frown  that Oikawa’s grown to hate so much, though.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Iwaizumi’s visits have grown frequent enough that the time it takes to get from Oikawa’s bed and to the kitchen goes from nine hours to thirty minutes. On days when he feels particularly confident, he greets the other boy when he passes. Some days Kuroo continues his rude habit of running on a thirty minute errand while he has the other over, and on those days Oikawa works up the nerve to talk to the other. By the time he inches towards the doorway and begins a conversation, there’s only eight minutes of conversation time before Kuroo gets home and he can hide away in the kitchen once more. It’s nerve-wracking, but it’s progress. Kuroo doesn’t give him a disappointed frown as long as there’s progress, and so Oikawa continues inching towards the living room to talk to the boy.

“What’s your major?” Iwaizumi asks one day, still typing at a shockingly fast pace on the laptop in front of him.

The question catches Oikawa off-guard.

What’s his major? He doesn’t really suppose he has one anymore. Not showing up to class for three months was probably not good for a major, and Oikawa had most definitely not shown up for three months. He answers, instead, with a major that a past version of himself had loved a rather large amount.

“Biochemistry.”

Iwaizumi nods, as if this makes perfect sense to him. “You must be pretty busy, then. I’ve heard that course is a lot of work.”

“Not as much work as a medical major,” Oikawa mumbles, because he’s really not busy, but he did used to be.

Iwaizumi snorts once, cracking a small smile. “Ah, true. It’ll be worth it, though.”

The room is quiet for a long stretch of time, and Oikawa wonders if Kuroo is taking longer than usual. The silence is unpleasant, making the hair on the back of his neck prickle with anxiety and his heart pound a little harder.

“You’re excited to be a doctor, then?” It’s an awful conversation starter—of _course_ he is, it’s his major. But it’s all that Oikawa’s mind is supplying in the silence of the moment, so he goes with it.

Iwaizumi hums once, finishing the sentence that he’s writing before setting down his pencil and glancing up to watch Oikawa. “I am,” he agrees. “It seems sometimes, like the world needs an awful lot of help. I want to be able to give it that.”

Oikawa takes a moment to pretend to mull over the answer. As concise as it is, it’s certainly far from a bad answer. The world _does_ need help. It needs the help of doctors who know what they’re doing, doctors who will give the help to those who need it rather than lingering back and playing it safe. They needed doctors who wouldn’t wait outside of buildings in safety for so long that the people inside the building out bled out, blood red, dark, _dark_ red and all over. The world needed doctors who would be there to stop the girl on the floor from bleeding to her death, because they could have _saved_ her, he _knows_ they could have saved her.

_He_ could have saved her.

Their doctors, currently, were incapable of doing that—in Oikawa’s opinion, at least. Perhaps Iwaizumi could be a doctor who _would_ help, though. A doctor who wouldn’t let people bleed out on the ground while other people cried over the sound of their friends screaming.

Iwaizumi’s eyes are watching him, and Oikawa expects fear to climb up his spine and fill up his throat. He waits to begin dying, but his heart stays calm. Iwaizumi is calm; Oikawa supposes it’s just the presence that he gives off. Oikawa can appreciate that, he likes the way that his heart isn’t pounding out of his chest for once, likes the way that his lungs feel free to take in as much air as he pleases. He is not dying, not right now.

Iwaizumi’s eyes are a warm shade of brown. His brown eyes look nothing like the cold green eyes that stared right at him in an even colder hallway, nothing like the eyes that stared right through him as seconds turned to hours and hours turned to years.

Oikawa had felt calm then, in the moments when they’d needed a good doctor. He had been faintly aware of blood on his arm and the way that his breathing was heavy and his face was coated with sweat. But he hadn’t been scared, not then. Not in the scariest moment of all. He had been calm, hands and back pressed to the stone wall behind him, as he looked back into cold green eyes and cold black steel. He didn’t remember if he’d been in any pain, couldn’t recall if he’d been thinking anything at all except for a calm mantra of _I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying._ He hadn’t died. He’d been sure he _had_ when he heard the loud noise and he’d gone deaf for a stretch of moments, squeezing his eyes shut until he heard a thud and a clack and he’d peeled his eyes open to see those green eyes rolled back into a lifeless skull.

He’d stood there, shaking for another millennia or two before the pain had become prominent and his mind had cleared just a little, fear taking over as his lungs forgot how to breathe again and his feet started to run.

Oikawa remembered the way that it had felt hours and hours and hours later, feet swinging back and forth on a bench outside of a hospital, arm bandaged but shirt still bloody. Kuroo had looked at him, and Oikawa had felt again the feeling of eyes staring through him. The feeling had made his skin crawl, even though it was only Kuroo, and Kuroo was Safe—perhaps the _only_ Safe person there was at all. Oikawa wasn’t even sure what it was about him that made him so safe, except for the fact that everything up until that moment had meant more pain and stress while he had meant going home and sleeping for the next ten years.

It doesn’t feel like that now, with Iwaizumi watching him through warm brown eyes. There’s nothing terrifying or deadly about his gaze, nothing calculating or concerned. There’s nothing at all but contentment, and perhaps a little tiredness, too.

Oikawa realizes a little bit too late that he hasn’t answered at all, but Iwaizumi doesn’t comment. He only stretches, leaning back as he does so.

“What field of biochemistry do you plan to go into?”

The question is a conversation starter, the kind of question that a nurse asks you when she’s trying to keep you awake and alert as she stops your arm from pouring blood. He remembers her asking that, too. He’d given her an answer. He doesn’t remember what it was, doesn’t particularly care anymore.

“I don’t think I plan to go into any field at all.” Oikawa replies, surprising himself with his answer. Iwaizumi’s surprised, too, Oikawa can tell. He raises an eyebrow. Oikawa continues. “I don’t think it’s for me anymore.”

Who is this? Who is he? Is he Oikawa Tooru? Doesn’t Oikawa Tooru love volleyball and science and stars? Doesn’t Oikawa Tooru like to go to the beach and play volleyball in the summer? Doesn’t Oikawa Tooru want to study plants and animals and learn and learn and learn from them, to help them to thrive? Doesn’t Oikawa Tooru find biochemistry fascinating? Doesn’t Oikawa Tooru love meeting people and looking good and going outside at three in the morning to watch the stars? Doesn’t Oikawa Tooru flirt and flounce and woo the people who he meets?

He isn’t Oikawa Tooru.

He isn’t really sure who he is anymore at all.

Iwaizumi looks sympathetic, shrugging good-naturedly. “That happens sometimes. Sucks though, doesn’t it? You’ll find something else you enjoy.”

Find something else to enjoy? Could he do that? Oikawa Tooru had plenty of things that he enjoyed. He liked the way that hot pavement felt under his feet, he liked the sound of cicadas protesting the hot air, he liked the smell of the salt water on the beach and the feeling of sand in his socks and the way that his knees got sweaty and gross after wearing knee pads for too long.

But he was not Oikawa Tooru.

He hums in agreement, nonetheless. Iwaizumi goes back to writing.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It takes Oikawa five minutes to get from his room to the living room where Iwaizumi is, now. The conversations have grown casual, and Oikawa thinks he’s able to go to speak with him so easily because there’s something about Iwaizumi that’s reassuring. Oikawa wants to treasure that reassured feeling, because it’s so nice but so brief.

He’s decided that Iwaizumi is Safe, too.

Kuroo is Safe, because Oikawa can’t recall ever feeling as immensely relieved as he did when he saw Kuroo. Kuroo had looked relieved to see him, too, though they had talked on the phone less than twenty minutes prior. Oikawa remembers the phone call. He remembers only saying _yes_ and _I don’t know,_ because yes, he was okay, but yes, he was bleeding, and yes, he was bleeding a lot, and he didn’t really know how much it hurt because he didn’t feel much of anything, and he didn’t know where he was, and he didn’t know what was going on. Kuroo must have figured it out.

Kuroo is relief, Oikawa thinks. That’s what makes him Safe.

Oikawa’s roommate had a myriad of friends. He was agreeable and easy to get along with, funny and selfless and helpful, though he was an absolute nuisance at other times. He’d had people over all the time before, to study or watch movies or have dinner. He got along with everybody, and never seemed to tire of being around other people.

He hadn’t had people over after, going out to their places instead. Oikawa wished, sometimes, that he weren’t the way that he was, because Kuroo had liked having people over. Oikawa wished he could just say _screw it!_ and go back to playing volleyball and writing essays and having just as many friends. In moments of clarity, when he knew there wasn’t a single thing to be afraid of, that it happened months ago, he knows how easy it would be to just get up and do it.

The clarity never seems to remain, though, and he always ends up right back in those blankets with the windows closed. Had he opened the windows since then? Has he even _looked_ outside at all?

He hasn’t, he knows, and he really, truly believes that he never will. He thinks this for a solid four and a half months since that day, and then the belief ends abruptly with a single question.

“Kuroo texted me since you aren’t answering—he wants to know if you’ll grab the mail.”

Oikawa groans, head leaning back on the couch as his groaning progressively grows louder. He’s tired of hearing the question. It’s like an endless reminder that he can’t do it. Kuroo means well, he truly does, but Oikawa knows he hasn’t been good about explaining what it feels like inside his mind.

Iwaizumi misinterprets the groan as laziness. He gives Oikawa a good-natured smile, standing up and stretching. “I’ll come with, if you want. I’ve been sitting here for hours.”

Has it been hours? Have they really been talking for hours? It’s incredible how Iwaizumi manages to bend time to work differently.

Iwaizumi’s already pulling the sleeves of his coat on.

“Is it cold out?” Oikawa asks, stalling for time. Iwaizumi nods, once.

The last time Oikawa went outside it wasn’t cold. He didn’t need a coat. His heart is beating so loudly he doesn’t think it’s going to last. It’ll give out soon from the stress of it all, and then he’ll be dead. He’s Going to Die. His lungs are forgetting how to breathe again, his body and mind are shutting down. His feet are standing up to go and hide and run and hide and lock the doors and close the blinds.

He walks to the closet instead, pulling on his coat and shoes, tying the laces as he listens to Iwaizumi talk about the weather. Iwaizumi is that kind of guy—the guy who’ll discuss the weather with you as a genuine point of interest. Oikawa pretends he knows what Iwaizumi’s talking about, as if he has set foot outside in the last three and a half months.

The door is in front of him, then. It’s locked, now. It’s locked and shut, and within it he is safe. He’s left his hiding place now, he’s in the open of this room. But the door is still shut and locked, and He can’t get in as long as it is. There’s nothing barricading this door. But the lock is strong, and surely it will hold. But he can’t hide in that spot forever, because the door will hold but it won’t hold forever. He knows that. He can hide behind that same table as long as he wants, but the other girl in this room is whispering to herself that she can’t hide there forever, and he supposes he can’t either. She’s whispering that he’ll break the door down, that he’ll kill everybody else and then he’ll come for them. He knows they’re in there, he jiggled the door earlier. They can stay and they can wait, or they can take a chance for their escape.

It’s a banging from upstairs that propels his feet forward. He’s out of his hiding place behind that table and scrambling for the door. He hears those sounds, the thudding and the popping and the banging, and he knows exactly what’s happening up there. He’s going to use their own misfortune to get away, he supposes, because he knows that as long as they’re dying upstairs then he won’t be dying downstairs.

The girl is scrambling for the door, too, blond hair spilling over her shoulders and sticking to the tears on her face as she waits behind him, waits for him to unlock the door and open it. The door squeals loudly when it opens and they both draw in short breaths of terror at the noise. The screaming upstairs is loud enough for them to hear it. The door is open now. The door is open now and they’re both in the open. They could die any moment now.

The door is open now. The door is open now and he’s in the open. He’s standing in the hallway of the apartment complex, and cold, pure fear is crawling up his spine. Oikawa’s legs don’t move for a moment. They don’t move and he thinks they’re not going to let him, like they’re the only sane part of his mind left.

They’re the part of his mind that remembers what happens now. They’re the part that remembers stepping into the tiled hallways and sprinting, sprinting, sprinting for the stairs. They remember running down those stairs and down the next hall, past the lunchroom and past the library, past bodies and blood and close enough to the exit that he could hear the sirens from out there clearly. His legs remember skidding to a halt as he learns for the first time that there’s not one killer there, but two. His legs remember the girl’s pretty blond hair spilling out on the ground after she falls and he remembers it getting dyed red, his legs _remember_ staring into those cold, green eyes. His legs remember the sound of his lungs heaving and the way that all the fear flowed out of him with the same consistency as the red leaving the other girl’s chest.

He wasn’t scared, then. He wasn’t scared now.

It’s the same calmness as then that he feels as he takes another step into the hallway. He walks towards the right. He’d walked towards the left that day. Iwaizumi appears behind him, switching topics to an essay that they have to right for their class.

He walks with a slowness that he’s sure will irritate Iwaizumi beyond belief, but Iwaizumi just keeps talking about his class and Oikawa keeps offering input. He doesn’t even realize he’s walked down the stairs and down another hallway and outside to the mail slots until he’s standing in front of them and fishing the keys out of his pockets. It’s muscle memory, he supposes. Oikawa swallows heavily, but unlocks the mail slot and pulls the mail out of it as if he hasn’t remembered the absolute terror coursing through his veins.

He takes a moment as the panic overwhelms him to pretend to scan the mail. Instead, he notices the way the wind is blowing his hair out of his face and a little girl is yelling to her brother from some other apartment on the other side. He notices the complete and utter exposure. Oikawa hurries inside, and Iwaizumi follows again without asking any questions.

They slow their pace as they reach the hallways inside once more and Iwaizumi goes back to talking about mundane things. Oikawa listens until they’re back inside the apartment, and he sinks back against the door with relief after he’s locked it. He’s made progress, he thinks. It’s the quickest progress he’s ever made. But it’s also the most overwhelming, and he’s definitely feeling overwhelmed now. The feeling slams into him like a brick wall, the same way that the pain had. He drops the mail on the counter and he’s back in his room before he even remembers to think.

He remembers that pain, he remembers not noticing it, too. Oikawa remembers being so focused on the threat of death, on the realization that he was _Going to Die_ that he hasn’t even realized some of the blood on the ground was _his._ Oikawa remembers being so intently focused on the dead girl and the green eyes that he hadn’t even the faintest idea that he, too, was bleeding intensely.

It’s almost funny, what your brain chooses to think in those last moments. In Oikawa’s last moments, specifically, his brain had chosen to think, _I don’t think I remembered to get the mail this morning,_ and then there had been a noise that was so loud his ears had stopped hearing and his heart had stopped beating and his body stopped feeling and his eyes stopped seeing. He had known in that specific moment that that was it and he was dead, or dying, and there wasn’t going to be anything _more._

His vision came back and his ears started ringing and a girl behind him was screaming and the green eyes in front of him were rolling back into the skull of a now-dead boy, who was falling just like the blond girl had. The not-blond girl’s screaming got louder and the pain ripped through him and the overwhelming fear slammed into him like a brick wall. He stood, because he didn’t even think he could do anything else in that moment.

The noises were back. They weren’t from the boy lying on the ground in front of him. They weren’t from two floors up.

He remembers the not-blond girl screaming her words, too, because it seemed all she knew how to do in that moment was scream. That probably was not helping her fear of being found.

So Oikawa runs, leaving the blond girl behind and listening to the way his footsteps hit the tiled ground. He turns one more corner and then there’s light, there’s light and it’s red and blue.

The relief doesn’t come as his feet hit the concrete steps, though. He’s still cold with fear and gasping for air. The relief doesn’t come all through the ride to the hospital (they’re all crammed into one truck, there’s so many of them. Oikawa remembers his feet dangling out the back because they didn’t all fit). The relief doesn’t come even after his arm has been tended to (not shot, just grazed, but it’ll still leave a pretty horrible scar). It doesn’t come even after he’s done being questioned (and they have so many questions, because he’s the last person who saw the killer alive).

It comes, at last, when he’s in the car and Kuroo’s turning the radio volume down and neither of them is speaking. Kuroo’s not going to ask about what happened and Oikawa’s not going to comment on the fact that in order for Kuroo to be there, he must have already been on his way from his own college forty minutes away even before Oikawa called. (Their apartment is right in the middle, as they’d both applied for roommates so late in the year they simply had to settle for a twenty minute commute with the only other stranger who was willing to get an apartment together. This turns out to be a lucky arrangement rather than an unfortunate one.)

He remembers crying then, and he’s crying now.

He always hated crying before. It doesn’t really matter anymore, not to him.

He’d cried then because of the pain, because of the fear, because of the blood on his shirt that wasn’t all his own, because of the way the dead blond girl looked on the ground, because he couldn’t stop seeing those green eyes.

He’s crying now because he still sees those eyes and he still sees the barrel and he still hears the click and the Noise and the ringing in his ears, still thinks those last thoughts over and over and over again, because he remembers the terrible terror of hiding behind that wooden table and making a sprint for his life. He remembers the screaming and crying and bleeding like it’s happening right now, and he’s not even entirely sure that it _isn’t._ In his mind, it always is.

The amber pill bottle is almost empty, but it’s still watching him from his desk. His desk is a wooden table, just like the one where he hid and breathed laboriously for hours and hours while the doorknob jiggled and people screamed from outside.

The pill tastes bitter, and the bottle is empty now so he throws it on the ground and swallows the pill as he buries himself in his blankets.

The relief is not as good as it was that day. It’s bad now, because he shouldn’t have needed it. He wouldn’t have needed it if he were still normal. If that had never happened. He’s angry, he’s so angry, he’s so angry because it happened, and he’s angry because he isn’t Oikawa Tooru anymore but he doesn’t know _who he is._

He doesn’t know who this boy is—this boy is afraid and weak and battered, and he doesn’t care about volleyball or the stars, he detests biochemistry, and he doesn’t have a single goal. He’s willing to rot away in these blue-painted walls.

Oikawa Tooru is tired of these walls.

He wants to see the stars again. He wants to go to the beach and smell the salt from the ocean and feel his kneepads digging into his knees. He wants to go to the coffee shop that memorized his order and forget to let the coffee cool off first, he wants to burn his tongue and feel it for the rest of the day.

Oikawa Tooru wants to go on drives to nowhere in the middle of the night, he wants to do something so crazy that he gets an adrenaline rush that makes him feel like he’s learning to breathe for the first time.

Oikawa Tooru wants to paint these walls a new color, he wants to leave his window open to let in fresh air in the mornings while he gets ready for classes. He wants to get so busy doodling on his notebook _during_ those classes that he’ll forget to take notes.

Oikawa Tooru wants to get the mail each morning and wear that shirt he loves and flirt with girls and guys alike. He wants to be _that boy who won awards in high school_ or _that boy who gave me his number._

Oikawa Tooru cannot be any of those things; Oikawa Tooru isn’t there anymore.

He’s trapped inside the body of a weak boy who wants to wither away into nothing and be done.

He’s tired of being trapped.

He can’t find a way out.

He wants a way out.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The next time Iwaizumi is over, Oikawa doesn’t go out to say hello.

He hasn’t left his room much at all in the past few days.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It takes Oikawa a week to make his way back to the living room the way that he used to. It’s the slowest progress that he’s ever made, but it’s progress.

He’s back to baby steps, he supposes.

He’s waited for this moment, tucked under the covers of his bed. He waited for Kuroo to disappear on his errand, and then took his long, long time creeping into the living room. Iwaizumi doesn’t say anything at first, and Oikawa frets he’s scared his make-shift friend away, but then he notices the way that Iwaizumi’s writing at a calm pace that can only be intentional. He’s waiting for Oikawa to say something first.

“I don’t go outside,” he blurts out, which is perhaps not the best tactic for trying to _not_ scare somebody off. The calm writing stops, and Oikawa wishes it would start up again. The sound is calming. It makes him think nobody is listening to what he’s about to say. “I don’t go outside because I’m afraid, I stay inside all the time and I don’t look outside and I don’t let Kuroo open the windows and I wish I would but I don’t.” He’s speaking quickly now, too afraid to stop and too afraid to really think. Iwaizumi’s pencil stays hovering above the page. “There’s nothing outside to be afraid of but my brain thinks there is, I always think I’m in a place that I’m not and it’s a terrifying place to be, but I really can’t seem to escape it.” He takes a breath in. He remembers how to do that, now. He remembers how to breathe.

“I’m not sure about a lot of things anymore, and I don’t really like people, but there’s something really good about you. I’m not sure what’s going to happen today or tomorrow or in five minutes, I’m not sure what’s going to be too much, and I’m not really sure who I am. I only know things that already happened, but that isn’t much good to me anymore. So I can’t really promise you I won’t freak out over little things, but I’d like to think we get along and I’d like to think we could keep talking and hanging out like this. Because I enjoy it.”

Iwaizumi’s reply doesn’t take a lot of thought—or, Oikawa doesn’t think so, at least, because it’s almost instantaneous when he says, “well, I’m not going anywhere.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_To:_ Iwaizumi Hajime

_From:_ Oikawa

_have you ever seen mars?_

_(the movie not the planet)_

_To:_ Oikawa

_From:_ Iwaizumi Hajime

_No. Have you ever seen Godzilla?_

_To:_ Iwaizumi Hajime

_From:_ Oikawa Tooru

_Everybody’s seen Godzilla. What kind of a favorite movie is that?_

_To:_ Oikawa

_From:_ Iwaizumi Hajime

_Yeah, But have_ _you_ _seen it?_

_To:_ Iwaizumi Hajime

_From:_ Oikawa

_No, I have not. I propose a tradeoff. I will watch your garbage movie, if you will watch my garbage movie._

_To:_ Oikawa

_From:_ Iwaizumi Hajime

_Alright, Crappykawa. Your deal is on._

_To:_ Iwaizumi Hajime

_From:_ Oikawa

_What kind of a nickname is that?! : (_

_To:_ Oikawa

_From:_ Iwaizumi Hajime

_It’s a fitting one, that’s what._

_To:_ Iwaizumi Hajime

_From:_ Oikawa

_Fine! Then you get a nickname too, Iwa-chan._

_To:_ Oikawa

_From:_ Iwa-chan

_This is only the beginning. My mind is teeming with endless possibilities for nicknames. Each time you’re an idiot, you’ll be rewarded with a new derogatory nickname._

_To:_ Oikawa

_From:_ Iwa-chan

_I don’t think you’ll have to worry too much about being kept in suspense._

_To:_ Iwa-chan

_From:_ Oikawa

_Mean, Iwa-chan!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!_

_To:_ Oikawa

_From:_ Iwa-chan

_You’re a lot more relaxed over text, you know._

_To:_ Iwa-chan

_From:_ Oikawa

_our past selves will forever haunt our devices and linger in our texting styles :’p_

_To:_ Iwa-chan

_From:_ Oikawa

_So I guess it’s really more_ _him_ _than it is_ _me._

_To:_ Oikawa

_From:_ Iwa-chan

_Well, aren’t you and him the same? A stem is still part of an apple. Just a different part._

_To:_ Iwa-chan

_From:_ Oikawa

_I’ll give your metaphor a solid 4/10 for effort._

_And, yeah. The stem is the part of the apple that nobody likes._

_Anyway. I’m not really the same as him. He had a lot of dreams and hobbies. I don’t think I have any._

_To:_ Oikawa

_From:_ Iwa-chan

_You do. We just have to unearth them. We’ll get to that someday._

_To:_ Iwa-chan

_From:_ Oikawa

_You would have liked him more, I think._

_To:_ Oikawa

_From:_ Iwa-chan

_Shut up. I like you the way you are._

_To:_ Oikawa

_From:_ Iwa-chan

_Stop being dumb and go to bed._

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~ ~ ~ ~

Oikawa speaks to Kuroo the next day—somehow for the first time since the meltdown after the mailbox.

Their conversation comes in the form of Oikawa placing his hands down on the countertop with too much force and scaring Kuroo into almost dropping his coffee.

“Jesus fuck,” Kuroo says, at the same moment that Oikawa says, “I went to the mailbox.”

Kuroo takes a moment to drag his brain together, never a morning person in the first place, and then looks at Oikawa with an expression that is the opposite of the one that he wears whenever Oikawa refuses to do that very thing.

“You did,” he agrees, and then the beam fades and his eyebrows knit together. “And then you had a mental breakdown and didn’t talk to anybody for a week.”

“Let’s focus on the bright side, shall we?” Oikawa replies, in a tone that mocks an ex-girlfriend of Kuroo’s that used to hang around the apartment all the time and spout overly-positive nonsense. The joking feels good, like sarcasm can knit together the little pieces of him that he’s lost.

Kuroo rolls his eyes at the old joke, but sets down his coffee anyway. “Okay. Bright side—you did get the mail. That’s an accomplishment. How do you feel about that?”

“You sound like a therapist, Jesus, stop that.” Oikawa mulls over the question for a stretch of time. “It felt good. And then it felt awful. But I talked to Iwaizumi. We text now.”

Kuroo’s eyes are glimmering with a mischief that promises no good. “You like him.”

“I don’t. Shut up, Tetsu-chan. Come back when you know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s alright,” Kuroo waves if off, picking his coffee back up and turning to disappear into his room to finish getting ready for his classes. “He likes you, too.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Oikawa learns that for a quiet person, Iwaizumi certainly does talk a lot during movies.

He also learns that Godzilla is not a bad movie, but he’s never going to admit that to Iwaizumi in a billion years.

The final thing that Oikawa learns that night is that he doesn’t think he would particularly mind a billion years of spending time with Iwaizumi on calm nights like this.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Oikawa texts him late at night after they’ve watched a copious amount of dumb movies that he doesn’t want to be afraid forever.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The next day Iwaizumi shows up and the second he’s taken his coat off he’s turning to face Oikawa with a question already written on his face.

“How would you feel about opening the windows?”

Oikawa blinks, unsure. The idea itself doesn’t seem too bad, and in this particular moment he doesn’t feel afraid of such a notion. But then he recalls the panic of going outside and the idea of opening the windows is the worst thing imaginable.

“We could start with the blinds. We’ll work our way up, then. And,” Iwaizumi adds, hanging his coat up. “If it’s too much then we’ll close them and try again when you’re ready.”

Oikawa nods, after the longest stretch of seconds imaginable, because there’s something about the way that Iwaizumi poses the question that’s reassuring. Maybe it’s part of their medical training. There’s probably something about this in all that information they’re given.

It’s not as overwhelming as he expects it to be. They open the blinds, and he can’t remember their apartment looking this bright in a long time. Part of him wants to hurry the process along, just open them already, but he’s hesitant to take anything any further. Oikawa forces himself to look outside of the windows, to look at the pavement below and the sky above and the trees just outside the window. He draws in a long breath and turns back to where Iwaizumi is pulling out a DVD to a movie that they’re probably going to hate to the point of amusement.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

They open the blinds all the way the next day, letting the sunlight pour in unstopped and fill up all the rooms. The window in Oikawa’s room stays closed all the way, the room stays completely dark, but he thinks he’ll get around to that last.

Kuroo doesn’t comment on the progress, and Oikawa’s thankful, but he does grin at Oikawa in a way that assures him he’s glad.

It’s overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time, so Oikawa leaves it at that for the next week and a half, until he’s stopped slinking around the corners and giving the windows untrusting looks.

When he’s ready, they pull the windows open. It’s gotten cold out, and Oikawa feels the rush of chilly air greet him instantly. But it smells fresh and there’s a sound of a bird singing somewhere out there. It’s a good feeling, smelling the winter on the wind and feeling the weak sunlight on his skin.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Oikawa knows for an absolute fact that he won’t be able to make it all the way to the mailbox again. Even the lobby seems too far away, and so they settle for the doormat.

Opening the door turns out to be the real struggle. Again, Oikawa lingers. He lingers and lingers, and he expects Iwaizumi to prompt him onward. His friend only sits at the countertop, though, head propped calmly on his arms. There’s no rush or urging in his expression, content to let Oikawa work at it his own speed. Part of Oikawa wishes he _would_ just urge him out the door. He wonders if he can do it without the push.

It’s another twenty minutes before he puts his hand on the doorknob. The metal is cold and he snatches his hand away immediately, casting it a wary glance. With his sleeve over his hand this time, Oikawa rests his hand back on the doorknob. He glances back towards Iwaizumi, who’s still only sitting calmly. He sends Oikawa a reassuring look, but otherwise only continues sitting patiently.

Iwaizumi is an overwhelmingly patient person.

Oikawa stands with his hand resting on the doorknob for a total of fifteen minutes before he finally whines, “ _Iwa-chan,_ ” and hear the chair scrape back as Iwaizumi stands up.

“You’ve gotta turn it,” Iwaizumi jokes, tucking his hands into his pockets. “To the left. Just make it like you’re ripping off a band-aid.”

Oikawa doesn’t voice the worry of what’s waiting outside, taking in a deep breath instead and closing his eyes for a moment. This was the moment that caused everything, then. What would have happened if he’d just stayed inside, then? Would the blond girl still be alive? Would her family have sobbed together in the parking lot if they’d stayed tucked in their hiding places?

“We don’t have to do this today,” Iwaizumi reminds him gently.

Oikawa shakes his head stubbornly. “I want to do this,” he protests vehemently. “I just…”

His voice trickles off, because he’s not really sure what he’s trying to say.

“You never know what’s waiting outside a door,” he whispers, unlocking the door with a sharp click. “You never know what’s down the halls. Even if you think you’re certain.”

He doesn’t give Iwaizumi a chance to reply, twisting the doorknob slowly. When it’s turned all the way, he pauses for a moment.

And then he pulls the door open. He squeezes his eyes shut and fear floods him as he _waits_ for the door to squeal, expecting to feel sharp nails digging into his arm and to hear a girl inhale at the same time as him. The door doesn’t make a single noise, gliding open easily. Oikawa waits for the terror to ebb away slightly before cracking his eyes open, staring at the familiar halls of the apartment and the doormat in front of him. That’s all he needs to do. He just needs to take a step forward and he’ll have done it.

He opens his eyes the rest of the way and lets the door swing back shut.

“Not today,” he says, spinning around and marching to the couch.

Iwaizumi follows him, picking up a remote and clicking on the television.

“It’s alright to take your time,” he tells Oikawa, as if it’s that simple, as Oikawa draws his knees up to his chest. “You’ve already come this far. Focus on the progress, alright?”

Oikawa focuses on the progress for now.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

They spend the next two weeks playing an on-again, off-again game where Oikawa works up the nerve to stand on the doormat, and then goes back to tucking himself away in hiding for a series of days.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Iwaizumi shows up the next day, and Oikawa’s already in the living room. He’s already in the living room with his face buried in his knees because the Noise is there in his mind, and he knows nobody else can hear it, but it’s still alarming to him how calm Kuroo is in the kitchen while all this Noise is in Oikawa’s head. It sounds present, it sounds real, but it’s not because Iwaizumi doesn’t seem to hear a thing either.

Iwaizumi starts fishing through his bag, like he’s already given up on progress for that day. Oikawa supposes that makes sense, not trying to push mental limits on a day where his mental limits are already very pushed. Oikawa stands up, though. Iwaizumi watches him warily as he stalks to the door, hand resting on the doorknob and staring at the wood the way that he always does. The fifty minute process takes fifty seconds this time, and then he’s twisting the knob and opening the door. With the way that Iwaizumi is hovering with that cautious expression on his face, Oikawa almost expects him to intervene. He doesn’t, only trails after him as Oikawa stands on the doormat. Oikawa really hasn’t thought this out, he realizes—a little bit too late, too, seeing how he’s already stepped off the mat.

He walks all the way to the end of the hallway, right to the top step, and then his legs refuse to listen anymore. They remember what happens when he walks down the stairs. Oikawa’s legs remember that there’s footsteps behind him _now,_ but there won’t be footsteps behind him when he walks out of the building.

Iwaizumi stops next to him, swallowing once and then sticking his hands in his pockets as his calmness seems to return to him.

“I can’t go down the stairs,” Oikawa tells him.

“That’s alright,” Iwaizumi replies with a little shrug. “You’ve already made a lot of progress.”

Oikawa shakes his head. “No, I can’t go down the stairs. Not now and not ever.”

Iwaizumi seems to be processing this.

“I don’t know what happens if I stay upstairs, but I know what happens when I go _down_ them,” Oikawa tries to explain, hands fiddling at his sides. He’s rocking a little bit on the balls of his feet. “Nothing bad happens upstairs, it’s all _down there._ ” Iwaizumi still doesn’t comment, and Oikawa knits his eyebrows together. There’s still too much Noise in his head. He stares down the steps and tries to remember why he ever went down those steps in the first place. He tries to explain this to Iwaizumi. “I’ll go downstairs and I won’t be alone, not then, I’m never alone walking down the stairs, but I’ll be alone when I leave the building. I’m always alone when I leave the building.” Oikawa’s voice sounds faraway. He wonders faintly if it sounds faraway to Iwaizumi, too.

“There’s no noise now, is there?” He wonders out loud. “You don’t hear that. It’s not really there. It’s quiet. But it’s not. It’s never really quiet. It’s never _really_ safe. Because just when you think it is, he’s there. He’s there and he’s waiting.” These stairs have carpet on them. His feet wouldn’t make so much noise pounding down them. “I wonder…what would have happened upstairs. I wonder if there was really any good ending to that. It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure path, and I chose the wrong path. There’s not a redo, there. Everybody who died stays dead and everybody who lives keeps on going. But,” his voice drops to a whisper, so soft he can’t really hear it over the Noise. “It’s not really living, is it?

“Not,” Oikawa takes a step down. “If you’re scared of what’s downstairs.”

“Oikawa,” Iwaizumi begins hesitantly, though he doesn’t stop the other from taking another step. “Do you want to try this another time?”

Oikawa’s on the third step down, and he swallows. Why did he go down those stairs, again? There was a reason. He knows there was a reason. “No,” he replies, taking another step down. “I won’t do it another time. It’s gotta be now.”

Iwaizumi looks cautious.

Oikawa’s halfway down the steps when a little girl who lives down the hall shrieks from inside her apartment. This isn’t a rare sound—she shrieks at every bug she sees—but in the moment it’s not the little girl two doors over shrieking at the spider on the doorknob, it’s the Noise that spurred his feet down the steps that day. His feet, upon memory, move down two more steps quickly, and then freeze. These aren’t the steps in the apartment building anymore, there’s no carpet on the steps that he’s seeing.

Oikawa stands on tiled steps, and he’s left with a choice. His legs won’t let him move forward, because they _know_ what’s down there. His legs know that if he walks down these steps he’ll face a killer by the door. His brain knows that if he turns and goes back to his hiding place behind the table then he’s risking a chance of facing a killer who may kill more than just the blond girl next to him. He knows he’ll live if he goes down these steps, but he knows anybody who’s there in that hall with him won’t. He’s not sure he’ll live if he turns back, but maybe the girl will live too, then.

His legs won’t go in either direction, he can’t move either way. He’s stuck here in this loop, he doesn’t want to die, not today, he doesn’t want to watch her die, either. He wants to make it out of there. He could go down, and look for a different exit this time. He could go down and go into one of the rooms down there, lock the door and climb out the windows there.

There’s no way he’ll make it, there’s no way that girl will make it. They’re both going to die in here, pointlessly.

Oikawa sinks down to the floor on the steps. He won’t make a choice. He won’t take a risk. He’ll just stay here forever and then nobody can die. This path won’t progress anymore. He’ll sit here and he won’t try anything at all and they’ll all live here in this hall forever.

“Oikawa,”

“I’m not going to choose,” he pleads, his voice a harsher whisper than he intends for it to be. “Everybody lives.”

“Oikawa,”

“This time everybody lives.”

“Nobody’s dying, Oikawa.”

“I can’t go down and I can’t go up, I can’t pick.”

“Then we’ll stay here,” a calm voice agrees softly, and there a small thud next to him. “We can wait right here.”

“You’ll live, too,” Oikawa assures them, staring blankly at the wall. “But I can’t promise the steps are safe, either. Nothing’s safe.”

“I suppose that’s true,” the voice concedes. “But if that’s true, why wait?”

“I know what happened downstairs. I know what happened upstairs. Nothing happened on these steps. Nothing happens here. Everybody lives here.”

The voice doesn’t say anything at all for a long stretch of time, and Oikawa hopes they finally understand.

“What steps, exactly?”

It’s a dumb question, but Oikawa remembers they’re supposed to ask dumb questions in order to cause a distraction. They don’t really need a distraction right now, but Oikawa indulges it anyway.

“The library is up. The cafeteria is down. Don’t go there. Nobody lives there.”

“What do the stairs look like? What do they feel like?”

“Can’t you see it yourself?” Oikawa mumbles, watching that cold, gray wall in front of them.

The voice hums, just once. “Indulge me. Tell me, anyway.”

Oikawa huffs out a sharp breath, but goes along with it once again. “They’re white. They’re white and yellow. It’s tile. It feels cold, and there’s always dirt.”

“Did you ever sit on those steps that day?”

“What day?”

“The day you went downstairs.”

Oikawa shrugs. “No. That’s why everybody lives this day.”

The voice doesn’t stop talking, but Oikawa’s starting to with it would. “Well, then, press your hand to them. Do you feel that right now? Do you feel tile and dirt? I think it feels more like carpet.”

“It’s tile,” Oikawa mumbles, pressing his hand to it anyway. “It’s tile,” he protests, even as he feels carpet under his hands. “It’s safe.”

“Well, then, who am I? Who am I right now, to you?”

“You were there, you were there downstairs, you walked down the steps and never walked out the door and I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but you get to live this time.”

“Feel my hand. It doesn’t feel very dainty or little, now does it?” The voice jokes, and Oikawa’s eyes move sluggishly to the hand that’s being extended towards him. It’s strong, full of calluses and bone.

“Stop that,” Oikawa breathes, pulling his own hand away. _Stop changing everything._

A dog barks downstairs. If they wait long enough, will those dogs come in there looking for them? The doctors and dogs never helped that day. Maybe they’ll help if he stays there.

“If you’re there, how do you know what happens?” The voice is trying to reason with him.

Oikawa heaves a heavy sigh. “It happens again and again. It happens over and over and over. If I go down and go left, she dies. If I go down and go right, I die. If we stay in that room, we both die. Here…everybody can live, here.”

“Oikawa,” it says again, more gently this time. “The stairs are carpet.”

“They’re carpet,” he agrees, reluctantly.

“Your apartment is upstairs.”

“The library is upstairs.”

“There’s no library. There’s nobody waiting for you downstairs. There’s just your apartment. Kuroo’s up there, we can go back up to your apartment, if you want.”

“Everybody dies upstairs. Gotta go down. Somebody gets to live if we go down. But who? Who gets to live? Which way to try this time?”

“Oikawa,” there’s exasperated fondness in the voice now. “Let’s go up. We can pick any way you’d like, everybody lives today. Kuroo’s upstairs, and I brought a tremendously shitty movie.”

“If we go down,” Oikawa muses in a murmur. “Kuroo will be there. He’s always there. That’s the way home.”

“He’s upstairs, this time. Let’s try that way. Home’s up the stairs.”

Oikawa’s eyebrows furrow and he scowls at the wall. The voice doesn’t seem to get it. That’s fine.

“Everybody dies upstairs,” he tries to explain forlornly, but he stands up anyway. “We’ll die up there.” His legs feel tired, but they give their last bit of strength to go up the steps to stand at the top. “I’m tired of dying,” he mumbles.

“Well, nobody’s dying right now,” the voice says again. It keeps saying that, but it really doesn’t understand that there’s no outcome where everybody leaves.

The hallway feels eternal, but the door doesn’t make any noise as it opens this time. It’s on the wrong side of the hallway. Kuroo’s sitting there, on a laptop, typing away like he hasn’t got a clue what’s going on right now.

“Everybody’s going to die,” he informs Kuroo mournfully. “Maybe you’ll have a chance downstairs.”

Kuroo watches him for a moment, and then closes his laptop. He stands up and disappears a moment later.

Oikawa bids him luck, though he’s not going to be able to hear it now. The hands from the stairway guide him to the chair where Kuroo had sat, and Oikawa rests his head in his arms, swinging his feet back and forth.

Kuroo appears again, and Oikawa makes a _tsk_ sound.

Kuroo frowns, pressing something into his hand. “Take that.”

“It’s from the bottle,” Oikawa says, glaring down at it. “That bottle’s broken. Everything’s broken. Where’d it come from? Downstairs? Why’d it come back up? Why’d we come back up? Coulda gotten out down there.”

The pill tastes bitter and familiar in his mouth and Kuroo’s hands smell like the soap they keep by their kitchen sink.

“Where are we, right now?” Kuroo asks him. “Tell me everything you see right now.”

Oikawa sighs heavily. “You’ve all gone blind.”

“Tragically,” Kuroo agrees. “I can’t see a thing, so you’ve gotta tell me what _you_ see.”

“The table,” Oikawa begins. “The desk. The window.”

Kuroo cuts him off. “Nah, I don’t remember seeing those. Are you sure?”

“Course I’m sure,” Oikawa mumbles sourly. “There’s the whiteboard, and there’s the chairs, and there’s the cups, and the notebook.”

Kuroo’s eyes light up as if he’s found something to hold onto. Oikawa hopes he holds on tight enough to live.

“Cups?” He asks, voice light. “Well, why are there cups in a classroom?”

“I don’t know,” Oikawa hisses, squeezing his eyes shut. “Don’t change things, stop changing things.”

“Nothing’s changing,” Kuroo tells him. “Feel the counter, do you feel it? It’s marble.”

“It’s wood,” Oikawa murmurs tiredly, but it’s too cold to be wood and he knows it. “You’re just the same. Don’t change things. Both of you. Just let it happen. It’s fine. It’s okay. It doesn’t really hurt.”

“Okay,” Kuroo concedes at last. “Alright, we’ll wait, then.”

By the time that his shoulders sag with exhaustion and the noise quiets, Oikawa thinks it’s probably been fifteen minutes. He was out of emergency pills, he was sure of it.

“You keep extras,” he mumbles disapprovingly, tiredly.

Kuroo’s eyes don’t move from his laptop screen and he keeps typing. “You have a tendency to break the ones you have rather than use them. Of course there are extras.”

“Where?”

“Telling you that defeats the purpose, don’t you think?” Kuroo turns at last to face him, face contorting into a frown for a moment. “What caused it?”

“Nothing caused it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure!” Oikawa snaps, not because he’s angry but because he’s _tired,_ he’s tired of this, he hates the fogginess that waits in his head for moments of weakness. He can’t be strong enough to keep it out all the time, he just _can’t._ “It’s just loud, there’s not a _reason._ This just happens, I can’t _stop_ it. I don’t even know who I _am._ ” Oikawa’s aware of his voice breaking, he’s aware of his fists clenching and his face heating, but he continues anyway. “What the hell kind of sane person even _does_ that? I’m not him. I don’t care about astronomy or biology. I don’t care. I don’t even know where I am, most of the time. I can’t _leave._ I keep walking out those doors in my head but I can’t ever _leave._ ”

Kuroo doesn’t say anything at all for a very time.

“I don’t really know,” he admits, in a slow careful tone. “I don’t really know what I should say here to help the most. I don’t know what to do, really, to help. I don’t really understand it, but I’m trying. I looked it up, but there’s nothing useful online. Nothing I could find that could help.”

His apologetic tone makes Oikawa frown. “You don’t have to try and handle it, it’s not your mess or your responsibility.”

“It’s not,” Kuroo agrees easily. He’s still stirring his coffee and his laptop is still humming lowly. “But I’m your friend, and I’d like to help. I’d like to see you out there again doing what you enjoy.”

“I can’t do it, I really can’t.”

Kuroo shrugs once, eyes meeting Oikawa’s for just a millisecond before he returns to writing his essay for whatever class he’s taking now.

“Maybe not without _help._ And, well, I may be wrong here, I’m only _guessing,_ but, y’know, there may be somebody who’d _like to_ help you.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Oikawa, as he is now, doesn’t like anything more than he likes the normality of evenings when Iwaizumi comes over. There’s nothing that he enjoys better than sitting on the couch with Iwaizumi to his left and watching the stupidest movie they can stumble across. It’s quiet, calm, and wonderfully normal. The old Oikawa would have done this, too. Except, had it been the old Oikawa, it probably would have been a movie about space and he wouldn’t have been able to sit through the whole thing.

He likes it better now than he ever would have before.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The next time that he makes it halfway down the steps his mind is clear. There’s no noise at all, just Iwaizumi on the steps behind him playing his part as a calming presence.

Oikawa can see the uncertainty in his eyes with ease. It would have irritated the old Oikawa, who hated sympathy and concern, but he doesn’t mind it much now. He feels as if he’s got amnesia, like he can’t remember the person who used to live in this body. He’s only going off of what passersby have told him, but this brain is not the same brain as the one that belonged to the person before. The only difference is that _he’s_ the passerby and he’s told himself everything about the person before.

He just can’t be that person.

Oikawa doesn’t feel as if that person were ever really him at all. That boy, Oikawa Tooru, was somebody who he read about in books, who he watched in movies, but who he can’t be. That boy spent hours getting ready in the morning because he cared about what he looked like, he would run and run and run because he liked it, because he loved the way the wind felt when he ran fast enough. That boy liked the feeling of sand in his socks and the way the view from his window looked at night when it rained. That boy had countless friends, people he didn’t even really know, because they liked his face and he liked the attention.

This Oikawa, the one stuck in this body now, doesn’t particularly care about how he appears to everybody else. He’s not particularly fond of attention, and he hasn’t looked out his window in what feels like years.

He’s not that boy. He doesn’t hate the concern he sees now in Iwaizumi’s eyes. His friend has every right to be concerned. The last time they were here Oikawa was having a mental breakdown.

He pauses right on that step, feet sounding heavy on the carpet. A dog is barking from somewhere. That’s alright. He waits and waits, but Oikawa doesn’t really think he’s going to be able to do it. Not today, anyway.

When he feels bile crawling up his throat he turns and stalks all the way back to the apartment.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

They try again each day for the next week, but Oikawa never makes it past that middle step.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Oikawa can’t sleep. This isn’t uncommon, of course, he never really can. His current tactic is to stay up as long as it takes for his body to give up, which doesn’t work terribly well, but it seems to be the only tactic that’ll work.

He’s not really sure what time it is, but the last time that he checked it was a little bit past midnight. The sun isn’t rising yet, but it probably will be soon.

Oikawa’s not really sure why, but he shakes off all of his blankets and stands up. His bedroom door doesn’t make any noise when it opens, and the front door is just as silent. The middle step is there, taunting him from down the hall, so he goes and he stands on it and swallows hard. He’s surprised he’s gotten this far by himself, and he really hates to think what’s going to happen if he hears or sees something that scares him. What happens _now_ if he freaks out and has an episode? His mind feels clear now, but will it if he sees somebody walk into the hallway with a backpack?

There’s a thud from down the hall, and it’s only a door shutting, but it spurs Oikawa forward in a burst of movement. Even though it’s an act of fear, he’s pushed his way through the invisible barricade to the next step down. Clearing the middle step is like ripping off a bandage, and it feels _good._ It goes to his head—it must—because he goes down the next four steps. The next step is a complete accident, taken only because his feet don’t stop in time, but then he’s on the very last step.

There’s a lamp on in the lobby. Nobody’s there, but Oikawa’s heart is pounding anyway. He hasn’t even seen this lobby alone since he walked into it with a red shirt and wet eyes. He’d been so happy to see it, then. He’s not very happy to see it now.

Oikawa draws his sleeves over his hands, taking a deep breath in and crossing the lobby. The metal under his palms feels cold as he pushes the door open. It’s windy out. It’s also cold out. Oikawa hasn’t thought this through. He’s outside now and, yeah, it’s a pretty big accomplishment. But it’s also terrifying, and his legs aren’t going to move. He can’t go back in, he can’t go any further out.

Oikawa sits down on the ground, pulling his knees up to his chest. His hand goes to his pocket instinctually, and he presses the only contact he’s called in the last four and a half months. It rings, and rings, and rings, and rings, and then the ringing stops.

“You better have a _fantastic_ reason for--,”

“I’m outside,” Oikawa says, surprising himself with the casualty in his voice as he says it. He thinks, perhaps, it has something to do with the calmness of Iwaizumi’s voice, present even when he’s angry. “What time is it? I didn’t check.”

Iwaizumi is quiet for a moment. Gathering his bearings, Oikawa is sure.

“It’s three in the morning.” A pause. “You’re outside?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing there?”

“I’m sitting.”

“…sitting?” Iwaizumi sounds as if his brain still hasn’t caught up. “Alright. Wonderful. Why are you sitting outside at three in the morning? Are you alright?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I feel alright. You worry like my mother, Iwa-chan.”

Iwaizumi scoffs into the phone, and there’s a rustling from the other end. “Yeah? Well, you didn’t do so great the last time you tried to go further, so you can’t blame me. Why did you call?”

“Just callin’ to tell you the weather looks nice tonight. Is it supposed to rain? I’m feeling it on the breeze.”

“Shut up, asshole. Why are you really calling?” The shuffling continues on the other end, so Oikawa’s fairly sure Iwaizumi already knows why he’s calling.

“Well,” he begins, nails scraping the concrete below him. “I’m fairly certain you miss my lovely face and so, being the generous man that I am—,”

“Shut up,” Iwaizumi says again, and his front door opens noisily. “I’ll be there in ten. Do you want to keep talking?”

Oikawa hums, resting his head again the back to rest against the stone of the apartment building. “Yes. Tell me about the project you’re working on now.”

So Iwaizumi talks and Oikawa listens, and he likes the way that Iwaizumi’s voice has grown to be familiar. He likes how it’s changed from strange to soothing, and it’s like music now with the way that it becomes familiar white noise if he forgets to listen and his mind starts to drift off. It’s calming and pleasant to hear now.

Oikawa knows when Iwaizumi’s there, because he hangs up the phone and Oikawa hears his footsteps. He opens his eyes lazily, watching the other in a tired manner.

“Hello,” he says.

“You good?” Iwaizumi checks, and when Oikawa nods he sits down on the ground next to the other.

“We got the mail the first time we talked,” Oikawa says, closing his eyes again and resting his head against the brick once more. He’s calm right now. The old Oikawa was never calm. “It was okay last time I went this far—well, I was nervous, but it worked out fine. You talked the whole time while we got the mail, that was the difference. So, I want to try that again. I want to know if I can get back up alright if you talk about a dumb project or something on the way up there.”

“Maybe it just puts you to sleep, because you never seem to _listen_ to a word I say,” Iwaizumi gripes, but his tone assures Oikawa that he’ll do it.

They stand up, eventually, and the minute that they’re up Oikawa feels anxiety pulsing through his chest and cutting him open like a knife. Iwaizumi begins speaking a heartbeat later, so Oikawa latches onto the words all the way through the lobby.

Iwaizumi talks the whole time they walk up the stairs. His voice only halts when he has to try and think up another topic, but they’ve already reached the door to Oikawa’s apartment. The hallway to the kitchen is quiet, and Oikawa spots the jacket that he wishes he’d brought with him when he’d gone outside.

“You can just stay, if you want,” he says, hesitantly. “It’s late…”

Iwaizumi’s watching him, and Oikawa expects him to say no, but he just shrugs and starts to take off his coat.  

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

 

He expects the alarms in his head to go off when he’s sitting on the floor of his room with Iwaizumi sitting across from him. There’s music playing from Iwaizumi’s phone, quiet enough that it won’t wake up Kuroo but loud enough that any silence in the room won’t be awkward, but there’s no warnings going off in his mind. The room feels just as safe with Iwaizumi in it as it does when he’s all by himself.

The room feels safe as they talk about where they’re from and what their families are like, the room is calm as Oikawa talks about Takeru and his older sister, it’s warm as Iwaizumi talks about being an only child and living close enough to the beach to hear it at night when he cracked his windows open. They talk about mundane things, like Christmases and trips to places where the sun would be high right now. Oikawa learns that Iwaizumi likes nerdy movies and never got into sports, and in exchange Oikawa tells him about volleyball and glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling of his childhood room.

He gathers up each fact that he’s given and holds onto them all tightly, as if they’re rope, so that they’ll catch him when he’s falling.

Iwaizumi likes the smell of vanilla. He has a dog with a dorky name. He wants to save people. He met Kuroo in a required language course for their college. He likes to keep his hair short so that it won’t make his neck itch.

It lets Oikawa feel normal, even if it’s only for just a moment. He almost wants to lean back and act casual and pretend like he’s just had a day of classes and work and now he’s relaxing with a friend instead of studying. For the first time in months, Oikawa desperately doesn’t want to feel the way that he does usually. The desire to go outside and not feel afraid is clawing its way up his throat and suffocating him.

It feels real, though, and ‘real’ is a good feeling to be having. It feels real when they talk, it feels real when they lean back against the bed and argue over the song that plays from Iwaizumi’s phone, it feels real when they forget about the music, and it feels real when they shift and Oikawa learns that Iwaizumi has soft lips. He keeps waiting for the feeling of reality to break, keeps waiting for the dreaming trance to take over, but it doesn’t. Iwaizumi just smiles a little and starts to talk about a memory from a holiday years ago.

It’s not like his dreams, and for that Oikawa is glad.

He has dreams, sometimes, where he opens the door and goes outside and doesn’t feel afraid. In his dreams he always grabs his backpack and slips on his shoes and heads out the door. He always called a silly parting to his roommate, _“don’t miss me too terribly, Tetsu-chan!”,_ before he opens the door and walks outside. It never occurs to him to feel afraid, not while he dreams. It’s always summertime in his head. The grass is always bright green, the sun always beats down red-hot, and the cicadas are always calling. In some dreams he just sits in the grass, feels the blades of it between his toes and lets the sunlight pour over him. In other dreams he’s at his favorite coffee shop several streets away, or at the sandpit near the beach where he played volleyball. It feels real, the way he has to get sand out of his socks and shoes afterwards.

It’s nothing like reality.

Oikawa’s dreams are always warm and calm, overflowing with nostalgia and youth. His dreams are the stories of a boy who liked to run and holler and meet new people, but they’re rewritten by a stubborn and fearful child who likes silence.

His room, in this moment, feels like one of his dreams. Even though it’s dark and the music is playing in the background of their silence. It doesn’t feel strange, though. It feels like any other day.

And then Oikawa is suddenly overcome with the urge to explain himself, and all the calm is shattered.

“I don’t know why I do it,” he mumbles, stretching out his legs and resting his hands behind his back. “It’s like…it’s like my head is foggy all the time. There’s this really thick fog there. But sometimes I’ll wake up or something and it’s gone, like it cleared out overnight. So, I don’t know, I want to go outside. Sometimes I want to do that—I _want_ to go outside and have all that again, and when there’s no fog I…I go for it.

“It’s like the fog is a wall or something, and when it’s not there I can actually see what I used to see. And I almost feel like I used to, like I could go out and really forget about this—this whole year.” Oikawa emits a frustrated noise, digging his nails into his palm as he curls his hands into fists. “I still want to go to college. I want to play volleyball. I want to do something more than sit in here and be nothing. But I _can’t._ The fog always comes back, and then I drown in it.”

Iwaizumi doesn’t say anything. Oikawa thinks it’s probably for the best, though, because he probably wouldn’t have liked any response that could have been given. Instead he just shifts, moving so that their sides are pressing together. Oikawa doesn’t know when, but at some point his head shifts to rest on Iwaizumi’s shoulder and he falls asleep.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Iwaizumi is still there come morning. Oikawa isn’t sure why he’s surprised, but he is. His head is tilted back and resting on the bed behind them, mouth open slightly as he snores. Oikawa wriggles away as cautiously as he can, unwilling to wake him just yet.

He makes his way to the kitchen, yawning as he pushes open the door to the kitchen. He finds Kuroo there, looking half asleep as he leans on the shima.

“You slept late.” Kuroo noted, half glancing up.

Oikawa shrugs, pulling open the fridge and staring blankly at the food inside. “Eventful night.”

“Oh?” Oikawa’s aware that he’s piqued his roommate’s interest now. “What kind of eventful?”

He shrugged. “That’s for _me_ to know and _you_ to wonder about.”

Kuroo groaned, nearly placing his face in his breakfast. “Jerk,” he teased, standing up and dumping the remains of his breakfast into the trash before setting his plate in the sink. “Seriously, what could you have been doing?”

_“Tetsu-chan,”_ Oikawa groans dramatically. “ _Things._ Wild things that you innocent mind can’t possibly comprehend.”

“You robbed a bank?”

“You would probably _like_ that.”

Oikawa leans back on the counter, palms pressing into the granite countertop behind him. Kuroo is regarding him with a look that Oikawa can’t read. But he can tell that there’s things that Kuroo wants to say, his eyes are practically overflowing with questions and comments. He doesn’t say anything, though. He only stands up and places his plate in the sink, then he turns and collects his shoes from the floor, tugging them on.

“Can you grab the mail later?” Kuroo asks, but by now Oikawa can tell he only says it out of habit.

Oikawa rocks on the balls of his feet for a moment, worrying his lip. “Do you need anything else?”

Kuroo blinks, and then he shrugs. “If you’re really bored you could do the dishes?”

“I _meant…_ ” Oikawa trails off, unsure of what he meant. He spends a moment trying to formulate a sentence in his mind.

“Like, out?” Kuroo asks, suddenly looking bewildered. He recovers after a beat, but there’s curiosity in his eyes. “I mean…I guess we need more milk, but…” Kuroo squints at him, standing up and grabbing his coat off the hook. “We don’t need it _that_ badly, though, and I can always grab it on the way home.”

“It’s fine. I’ll get it.” Oikawa mentally pats himself on the back for making his voice sound so sure when he was anything but.

Oikawa watches Kuroo hesitate for a moment by the door before he swings it open. “Alright,” he agrees. He shoots Oikawa a smug grin, then. “Tell Iwaizumi hello for me.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

**Author's Note:**

> The epilogue for this will be up soon. If you liked reading this, let me know with a comment! Honestly, feedback makes it worth it :)
> 
> Or, even better, shoot me a message on any of the media below:  
> Tumblr: 12am  
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> 
> Thanks for reading!


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